Subj : Re: RIP Niklaus Wirth
To   : tenser
From : Dr. What
Date : Wed Jan 17 2024 07:44 am

-=> tenser wrote to Dr. What <=-

 te> the rest of the research community).  So Communications
 te> used to have a lot of papers that were kind of systems-y,
 te> but much less these days.  Communications nowadays is
 te> more like a magazine.

Ya, I let my membership lapse because they were moving away from computer
technology and getting into more social-issues-and-stuff.

 te> Software tools took on a life of its own outside of the
 te> books, and was a thriving project for quite a while,
 te> particularly in the minicomputer era.  E.g., it was quite
 te> popular on Pr1me computers.

For me, what was interesting about Software Tools was that it was general, but
still kind of basic.  So if you wanted to learn a new language, or computer
system, it was a accomplishable challenge to port the Software Tools ideas to
that language/system.

In the mix, you got experience in that language/system and a box of useful
tools.  But I think that was the point of Software Tools.

 te> These days, of course, there's a C compiler for everything;
 te> back then there was a Fortran compiler for everything, and
 te> then a Pascal compiler for everything since that was the
 te> language of teaching for so long.

But even back then there was a C compiler for everything with a disk drive.  I
have a C compiler for all my vintage systems ranging from TRS-80 Model 4P, to
CP/M and MS-DOS.

Now, they weren't necessairly really good C compliers and had some serious
limitations, but they were there and useable.

 te> Oberon was the last of
 te> Wirth's languages, and in many respects, it was closer to
 te> C than to Pascal; as such, it remedied many of the short
 te> comings that Kernighan noted in his polemic about Pascal
 te> (for example, in Oberon, the size of an array is not part
 te> of its type, like in C).  Had there been an Oberon version
 te> of the book, it may have been a more natural presentation,
 te> like a C version, for many of the utilities.  Of course,
 te> Oberon didn't exist at th time.

Ya, but we have to take the market into account as well and what developers
wanted.

Pascal served us well as a teaching tool, but the market demand was for C and I
got that in college.

Oberon sounds nice, but if everyone wants to learn C, no one pays attention to
the other options.


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